Why not display a viewcount of threads?

Dear members,

Are you also curious about how many views your thread got?
It's something I always like to know if I a start a thread, just to get an idea of how big of a reach
my thread has. Is it just me or would you also like a viewcount for threads?

Please flag if you agree and feel free to share your opinions on this idea...

WombRaider69

I've thought it would be cool. But I can't imagine the logistics that goes into something like that...

a reply to: CagliostroTheGreat

I have seen many basic websites with a viewcounter, so I don't think it would be that difficult to realise? Some1 with some pc knowledge who can confirm this?

a reply to: WombRaider69
When I first arrrived there were "viewcount" stats on view in the member's profile, but even then they were set to zero and presumably disabled.
If a particular facility used to exist on the site and doesn't exist any more, that is probably a sign that it was deemed to be too demanding on resources. If that is the case, our chances of gettting it back are slim.
(That is one reason why stars and flags are useful, as a substitute for viewcount stats. Normally the first star or flag that appears on one of my threads is the first indication I get that anyone has noticed it)

Wasn't it here at one time but removed to reduce overhead. Someone will remember or find the thread.

We had that for quite a while. Got too big and that became a resource drain, better used elsewhere.

Use to have a view count, years ago.

Here is something from management on the subject.

I would rather they have that than flags or stars, then maybe there would be a little better content instead of just star and flag whores

originally posted by: WombRaider69
I have seen many basic websites with a viewcounter, so I don't think it would be that difficult to realise? Some1 with some pc knowledge who can confirm this?

It would be a pointless number.

Our massive "footprint" of over five million indexable pages means that we get a crazy amount of traffic from indexing agents and other non-human bots. A while back, MOAT (real-time audience measuring software used by advertisers) threw up a red flag, saying ATS had an extraordinary amount of fraudulent traffic. That issue was corrected when I tallied traffic from bots...

48 Hours of Bot Traffic
bingbot..............................893,181
yacybot.............................363,352
Slurp.................................348,853
AhrefsBot...........................266,109
Yandex...............................263,876
Googlebot...........................163,393
SearchmetricsBot...................74,776
Baiduspider...........................62,636
GrapeshotCrawler...................19,500
MaxPointCrawler.....................9,882
Clickagy Intelligence Bot v2.......5,617
NetSeer crawler......................3,054

There’s a few smaller ones for a total of 2.52 million hits on content pages from indexing agents in 48 hours... which is an average of 14.5 hits from non-human sources every second.

Most of these bots detect changes in pages, and keep checking pages that change regularly, such as new threads. So I looked for bot activity on a popular thread; more than 20,000 hits in 24 hours... while Google analytics only showed about 5,000 human hits.


The above bot activity also illustrates why we need to have an expensive hosting solution: 15 hits on database-heavy pages every second just to satisfy non-human web traffic.


So. For us, thread-view counters would be a pointless, as it would never reflect how many people saw the thread.